Orwell bio gets compelling novelization
Work of fiction sticks to the facts as it examines the relationship between author and iconic book
George Orwell probably wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Nineteen Eighty-Four was back on the bestseller lists in 2016 and 2017, more than 60 years after its first publication, in the wake of the Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump and the rise of “alternative facts” and “fake news.”
He likely would have been disappointed, though.
Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in the last years of his life (he died of tuberculosis in early 1950, mere months after the book was published), drawing together his political disillusionment and his observations of the world around him to create a nightmare vision of a totalitarian state which functioned through omnipresent surveillance, brutal violence, bureaucratic doublespeak (the term actually originated in this book, a testament to its ongoing effect) and a constant rewriting of official history, all under the watchful eye of Big Brother. Orwell wrote it not as a prediction, but as an extrapolation from then-current events, a warning to future generations.
At least, this is the argument put forward by Dennis Glover in his new book, The Last Man in Europe. Glover, who has a PhD in history from King’s College, Cambridge, frames this argument not as an academic inquiry — as one might expect — but as a novel, a sprawling but compact recreation of Orwell’s last years and his writing of the book, with impressionistic glimpses of the events that shaped the novel. As he writes in the afterword, “The Last Man in Europe is a work of fiction, but one that attempts to keep as close to the historical facts as is possible without sacrificing the dramatic requirements of the novel form.” While specialists may quibble (although the novel has been well-received by the Orwell Society), from a lay reader’s point of view, he has succeeded masterfully.
Working from an immersion in Orwell’s published works and his journals (which occupy 20 volumes), Glover convincingly enters Orwell’s often-prickly psyche, documenting the heartbreaks and betrayals that created his unique and prophetic world view. He sidles alongside Orwell’s work to show the rise of fascism in England in the 1930s (Orwell aficionados will delight in references to Wigan, for example, contextualizing the rally in the novel with Orwell’s The Road To Wigan Pier) and the betrayal of socialist antiFascist forces (of which Orwell was a part) by the Soviet-controlled NKVD during the Spanish Civil War (which Orwell wrote of in Homage to Catalonia).
Having established the close relationship between Orwell’s life and work and his own imagining, the heart of Glover’s novel is the time spent in Jura, on the Hebrides, where Orwell, suffering and swiftly declining from tuberculosis, wrote his masterpiece.
It’s not, strictly speaking, necessary to have read Nineteen Eighty-Four in order to enjoy The Last Man in Europe: the story here stands on its own, and enough of Orwell’s novel has seeped into the public subconscious to make elements at least hazily familiar. Readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four, however, will find the novel a special delight, tracing the roots of the book in unremarked passages. Glover, for example, links one of the classic images of Nineteen Eighty-Four, that of the power of the state being likened to “a boot stamping on a human face — forever,” to the Spanish Civil War: “So this is what the Bolshevik Revolution had come to: a boot stamping on all who resist, forever.”
Similarly, the onslaught of rats into the house in Jura, and a vivid image of a rat in a trap, “trying to claw its way through the ancient, rusted wire, alternately scratching and biting the thin iron bars” will immediately bring to mind one of the most harrowing passages in Orwell’s novel. (And, deliberately vaguely, readers of Nineteen Eighty-Four will react, powerfully and intuitively, to Orwell agonizing over a single typed character, upon which an entire philosophy of humanity, and our future, hinges.)
The Last Man in Europe ( the title itself is significant, as it was the working title for Nineteen Eighty-Four) is a unique and thought-provoking work, intellectually challenging and emotionally rich. It will likely compel readers back to Nineteen Eighty-Four — never a bad thing — and force them to take a look at the world around themselves, to consider warnings unheeded.